Friends

So take that, Gordon Gekko--er, Ivan Boesky. I poked around the Cleantech Forum a bit this week. Lots of gray and navy blue suits there, with few of the jeans-and-polos found at dot-com dealmaking events, but it was relatively laid back nevertheless when you consider all the money-matchmaking involved. The $3.6 billion poured into the emerging clean tech sector in 2006 is twice the 2004 amount for North America and Europe. There are billions and billions of dollars just waiting to anoint the next clean, green, money-making machine. Startup CEOs and scientists were snapping wishbones, crossing fingers, trading cards.

Want to gobble up clean stocks? Be on the lookout for the IPO of some yet-unpopular, cleantech cousin of Google! But which company will it be? One that can print thin-film solar panels? A large-scale maker of biofuel blends? A startup that's making LED bulbs cheaper?

I wandered around some booths and learned about Group IV Semiconductor, backed by $10 million and working to make silicon-based,
energy-efficient LED lightbulbs that might sell for a mere $3 a pop by
2010. Cheaper, white LED bulbs could be the holy grail of bright, low-energy lighting. SpringStar is working to get rid of things that bug you without pesticides with gizmos that mimic insects' mating calls and perfumes. However, there's no bedbug treatment yet because mimicking their stinky pheromones would make your boudoir smell pretty skanky. Engineers at Lawrence Berkeley Labs are building air quality sensors that they hope they can shrink to fit in or on cell phones. Here's more show-and-tell.

In the adjoining rooms, each panel seemed to be running nearly an hour late. At a talk about corporate market drivers, Ali Iz of G.E. said his company has been snapping up great money-making green businesses, but it needs to figure out how to support innovation that's not yet profitable without spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

PG&E, the villain of Erin Brokovich, has greened nearly every bus station in San Francisco with ads for its eco-friendly efforts in recent months. During the Cleantech Forum, PG&E let loose that it's donating a year of office space to hot startups Adura Technologies (makes wireless lighting sensors)
and GreenVolts (working on cheaper, more concentrated solar panels). I planned to make it to the mayor's announcement about launching a cleantech S.F. business campus near the former PG&E plant, but I was interrupted by friends who were wine tasting a block away. Cabbing it home two champagne flutes later, there was no hybrid to flag down. But that could change soon too.

What's next? If you're dying to get rich off of companies built to keep the planet from dying, then scroll down and look in the left column for my updated "Green Money" links of lots of cleantech-related blogs. The tickers at Sustainable Business can be useful too.

On another note, Apple's ad campaign for its latest invention is ripping off Christian billboards circa 1999. Can God sue?

Look at my footage below: the oglers at Macworld are venerating the new iPhone as if tears and blood were streaming from its Magic Touch screen, imparting a telepathic message of eternal life and everlasting forgiveness. Instead, the gadget comes with a mortal battery, it demands a contract with a devilish telecom, and nobody's even touched it. Get real, people. It's a phone...oh yeah, and a music player and an "breakthrough Internet communications device." It can't feed or clothe you or detoxify your drinking water. Before I leave this earth, maybe I'll see a crowd like this one oohing and ahhing and elbowing over some new invention that actually helps people and the planet.

You buy organic milk and eat Ben & Jerry's ice cream because it's free of hormones, which can throw your body out of whack in mysterious ways. But what are you rubbing into your scalp? Many shampoos and conditioners--especially those marketed to smooth the hair of black women--are packed with synthetic hormones, which your body easily sucks in through the skin. How about organic brands instead? In test tubes, even lavender oil mimics estrogen.

A debate is raging about why nearly half of black girls and 15 percent of white girls seem to be starting puberty by age 8. (I couldn't find any way around the P word, yech.) Some toddler girls and boys even develop breasts, suffering what the NYT highlights as "preschool puberty." Could it be mom's shampoo--Super Gro being so aptly named? Or plastics, with hormone-disrupting phthalates rubbing into our mucous membranes through pacifiers and sex toys? What about the omnipresent industrial chemicals that monkey with our endocrine systems and so much more? It's been seven years since the government was supposed to take a hard look at how such ingredients mess with the environment and our bodies.

Scientists don't even know enough about how hormones work to endorse them after menopause, or to warn women about a breast cancer link. But the FDA lets drugstore bodycare products contain just as many artifical female hormones as grandmother might swallow in her daily change-of-life horse pills.

The estrogen compounds in the urine of millions get flushed into our groundwater, streams and oceans, probably rendering frogs and other delicate creatures infertile. Yet gynecologists regularly push birth control pills on tweens. Women even take the pill year-round so they'll never have to have a period; a new drug will make that even easier. What to do? Stuntmother puts the lack of an answer better than I can:

Problem is, there's something worrying every time I swing my head
around. Water has lead. Shampoo has lavender. Food has growth hormones
or has been genetically modified. Our vegetables are sprayed. Our
playgrounds have glass in the grass and needles on the swings. Our cars
are spewing out carcinogens, as are our factories and air conditioners.
Our crackers have preservatives and polyunsaturated grease. Fish is
riddled with mercury. George Bush is president. Perverts lurk on the
internet and reality television is weird. North Korea has nuclear bombs
and the Gulf Stream is slowing. Oil is over sixty dollars a barrel and
clothing is sweat-shopped. Children are dying in mines and orphanages
and pressure treated wood has arsenic. New paint and carpets off-gas
and old carpets have dust mites and old paint has lead. People still
think that Paris Hilton is pretty and the authorities (ha!) can't
decide whether 10,000 or 600,000 Iraqis have died since we charged into
Iraq.

There are dangers everywhere and a thousand more I do not
know or that have not yet been discovered. I cannot be a one woman
shield against all that is poisoning, threatening, lurking and
destroying my children. I want to be -- but I can't. So where is the
line?

On the dim side, today's featured wager, placed by knighted astrophysicist Martin Rees, foresees that one event of bioterror or bioerror (rising "from inadvertance rather than evil intent") will wipe out a million souls by 2020. So far the odds are 50/50--the same odds Rees gives our species for lasting another century.

Other predictions are on the brighter side: Also within 14 years, could solar energy be as cheap as fossil fuels? Will the average household keep a room to make a self-sustaining water supply? Will we make huge strides toward clean energy within a decade? And when will people stop denying global warming? To add your wager to the public debate, just don't expect to get your money back; all proceeds will go to charity.

Why would UC Berkeley students wear lime juice-soaked tampons for two weeks? Are people thateccentric on the left coast, or is DIYdouching in vogue? Neither, or both--but really--those Cal coeds were part of a test trying to find whether citrus power might safely fight HIV. Women account for 60 percent of the world's new HIV cases. If you grew up far from Berkeley, in a place where your father sold you for cows, chances are that you lack the security or health knowledge to make a man wear a condom. Could a dash of lime-based microbicide become a low-tech secret weapon for such women? That's what Berkeley public health researcher Anke Hemmerlinghopes. For two decades, health educators and advertisers pushed lubricants containing HIV-killer nonoxynol-9 until realizing that the chemical instead made it easier for women to get the virus. As the East Bay Express explains:

Natural microbicides extracted from fruit or other plants could be a particularly elegant way around the pharmaceutical industry. It's not such a weird idea -- for centuries, women have whipped up homemade contraceptives and microbicides from things like lime or lemon juice, vinegar, honey, and olive oil. With a pH of 2.2, lime juice is sufficiently acidic to kill most
microbes, and can neutralize HIV in a test tube in less than a minute...There may be other natural options -- the second-best HIV killer is
pomegranate juice -- and the active substance in Carraguard, one of the
lead pharmaceutical microbicides being tested, is carrageenan, which is
derived from seaweed.

Acidic citrus fruits and seaweed make some strong cleaning products, too. Although limes may eat away at condoms, early tests with willing human guinea pigs show that the tart fruit isn't too harsh for women's bodies. Maybe green microbicides will be a mainstream sexual safeguard for when condoms aren't an option, but more tests are needed. Unfortunately, makers of phony HIV-slayers such as Green Sun (and even spray on condoms), are scamming people into believing they can already get natural protection in a bottle.